REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT DINNER FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF ARKANSAS
IN HONOR OF SENATOR DAVID PRYOR
Governor's Hall II
Statehouse Convention Center
Little Rock, Arkansas

8:25 P.M. CST

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, Jimmie Lou. I
will treasure this always. I wish you could have gotten me a
ballot of a precinct that I carried. (Laughter.) You know, I
ran in Sebastian County a zillion times, and I started in 1974;
it took me until 1990 where I finally carried it. (Laughter.)
But thanks to some of you in this room, it finally happened. I
thank you very much. I thank you, Jimmie Lou Fisher, for being
my dear friend and for introducing me in October of 1991 on the
steps of the Old State Capital. You seem to bring good luck to
me and to everyone else whom you touch.

I thank Maurice Mitchell and Skip Rutherford and
everyone else who had anything to do with this dinner tonight.
Chairman Gibson; my dear friend, Mack McLarty who came out with
me tonight and who has done a wonderful job on all of our behalfs
in Washington; I'm so grateful to him for being there with me
these last three years. To Congresswoman Blanche Lambert
Lincoln; if there is a living soul in this country who can change
a deer season, it's her. (Laughter.) I've gotten to where when
she starts coming at me, I just say yes before she ever says
anything. (Laughter.) It saves a lot of time and a lot of
energy, always the same result. (Laughter.)

Senator Bumpers, you do not have to get off the back
door tomorrow. (Laughter and applause.) But however, after a
few of those jokes tonight, I hope you won't mind if I ask you to
board by the back door. (Laughter.)

I want to say that I am profoundly grateful to Dale
Bumpers for what he's done for our state and what he's done for
our nation, and for the kind of voice that he's been in the
United States Senate for all of these 18 years or 22 years or
however long he's been there -- since -- it seemed like before I
could vote -- (laughter) -- but never more than the last two
years when he has found that soaring eloquence in the service of
views that seemed to be fading from fashion until the last few
months. (Applause.) And it's because people like Dale Bumpers
speak up in the lean times as well as the good ones that this
country stays on the path to progress and keeps its common sense
about it, and I'm very grateful to him, and all of you should be
as well.

So, Governor Tucker, let me say I hope you pass your
bond issue and I hope you pass a constitution. He was too
gracious to say it, but when he was reeling off all of the names
of the governors that tried to get a new constitution, he could
have said, had he been less gracious, that we all failed.
(Laughter.) But that doesn't mean we don't need one. And I am
especially grateful to you for taking on a lot of tough issues
that are often thankless because you know that 10 or 20 or 30
years from now, if we do these things, people will look back and
say "thank you very much; it might not have been popular at the
time and it certainly wasn't easy at the time, but it was the
right thing to do," and that's the kind of governor you've been,
and I am very grateful to you for it. (Applause.)

To Senator Pryor and Barbara and all of the Pryor
family, let me say I am very honored to be here tonight. Hillary
wishes she could be here. She called David; they had a long
conversation this morning. Neither one of them would tell me
everything they discussed. But she loves you very much, as you
know, and wishes that she could be here with you. But our
daughter is engaged in an activity tonight that required her
presence in Washington, and I know you understand that. But she
and I feel a special debt to you and a special bond.

Ladies and gentlemen, I've got to be honest with you --
I'm kind of like Dale. This is a night I hoped would never come.
I'm glad you showed up, and I thank you for your devotion to the
Democratic Party and to Dale Bumpers and to Jim Guy Tucker and to
our Congressman and our Congresswoman and especially to Senator
Pryor. But I hoped that this night would never come.

You know how there are just things in life you assume
would go on forever? I just assumed David Pryor's career in the
Senate would go on forever. I thought long after I retired from
the White House I would be back here with you, you know, wearing
his buttons and having his bumper sticker on my car. (Laughter.)
I figured I would be writing him someday, asking me to help me
with my Social Security check. I just thought it would go on
forever. (Laughter and applause.)

So today, my whole life has been parading before me. I
flew into Fayetteville and went to the ball game, and then I came
down here and I got to see the Ozarks and I got to see the river
valley that I love so well, and I got to relive my whole life
with David Pryor. The first time I ever met David Pryor I
remember it just like it was yesterday. He was walking down the
street in some small town in South Arkansas, asking people to
vote for him for Congress. And I was not quite 20 years old.
And I thought he was really something. It turned out I was right
-- he was really something. (Laughter.)

I remember once when I was a senior in college, and he
and Barbara were standing outside a restaurant in Washington,
D.C. one night and I was just walking down the street and I ran
into them. And he was a congressman and I was a college student.
They invited me in to sit down and have a bite with them and just
talk. And I couldn't believe it. There was nothing in it for
them and it was a night they could be alone and away from
politics and away from the pressures of the job. It probably
didn't mean much to him, but I've never forgotten it after all of
these years.

I remember when he suffered the only defeat he ever
endured in 1972, the incredible dignity and grace and generosity
with which he bore it. It was a lesson that I had occasion to
apply later on -- (laughter) -- more than once, I might add, but
one I never forgot.

I remember when he ran for governor in 1974, as Jimmie
Lou said when I ran for Congress, what a tough time it was, how
hard it was to keep people focused on the fundamental goodness of
our way of doing public business and the need to keep pushing
forward because we had such a terrible recession. I remember
sitting in the back of the governor's limousine in 1978, when I
was attorney general and he was governor, and he told me he was
going to run for senator, and he suggested I might run for
governor.

And he said -- I never will forget this -- he said, you
know, as young as you are, you might even make a career of it;
you might survive 10 or 12 years. (Laughter.) Well, I wanted to
be governor, but I thought he had a screw loose. It turned out
he was right about that. (Laughter.) That race in 1978 gave him
a chance to be a senator, gave Jim Guy Tucker a chance to be a
governor -- and, I might add, a great governor. It gave Ray
Thornton a chance to -- (applause) -- it gave Ray Thornton a
chance to be the president of both of our great, big universities
and go to on -- come back to Congress and help us all stand
against the flood tide up there. It was an interesting year.

One of my great joys all during the decade of the 1980s
was going to these events that David and Dale and I used to go to
and tell all of our bad jokes over and over again, to see whether
we could still get a laugh, knowing all of the time that we were
able to do something here, to keep a certain spirit, a certain
sense of togetherness, a certain sense of being willing to make a
future that a lot of our fellow Americans were having a hard time
holding on to -- thanks in no small measure to David Pryor.

But the thing I remember most vividly tonight was in
the cold, cold winter of 1991 and 1992 in New Hampshire, when our
passion for a new future ran into the politics of personal
destruction, and everybody said our campaign was over. David
Pryor and Barbara Pryor were there day-in and day-out, walking in
the snow, knocking on the doors, talking to people about what
this country could be and what it ought to be, and what kind of
direction we ought to have in Washington. And as long as I live,
I will never forget they did not have to be there, but they were,
and it made all the difference. (Applause.)

You know, our whole country's existence has basically
had three great strands: our love of liberty, our belief in
progress, and our struggle to find common ground amid all of our
differences. I can think of no public official in my lifetime I
have ever met from any place who better embodied all three of
those things, and who always knew that unless we could find
common ground through decency and standing up for the values that
made this country great, it would in the end not be possible to
preserve progress or even liberty.

In Washington today we are having the debate of the
century about what kind of people we are and what kind of future
we're going to have, what our obligations to each other are, and
whether we really believe in opportunity for all and
responsibility from all. Whether we really believe we have an
obligation to help families stay together and to take care of our
parents when they're sick and our children when they're growing
up. Whether we really believe that we are, as our motto says,
from many one.

David Pryor is the embodiment of what I want our
country to keep at and to become and to do. Senator Bumpers
quoted de Tocqueville. He said a long time ago that this is a
great country. "America is great," he said, "because America is
good. And if America ever ceases to be good, she will no longer
be great." David Pryor has been a great public servant because
he is fundamentally good.

William Wordsworth said the last best hope of a good
man's life are the little, unremembered acts of kindness and
love. David Pryor, over more than 30 years, every person in this
room and every person in our state has been embraced by your
kindness and love, and we thank you. (Applause.)